PREFACE
It is proposed from time to time to publish Addresses
given to the I.D.K. Club, and also Essays, when it
is felt they have some permanent or general interest.
The Club is not committed to any sect or political party;
it offers, in fact, a free arena for every sort of opinion,
being concerned with the study of everything which may interest
or benefit mankind.
Mr. Chesterton has kindly allowed us to open this series
with his lecture, "The Superstitions of the Sceptic";
and this volume is printed from a shorthand verbaitm report,
together with a correspondence between the author and Mr. Coulton,
the latter part by kind permission of The Cambridge Review,
in whose columns the correspondence appeared.
The remarks which were concerned merely with the particular occasion
and place of the delivery of the lecture have been omitted.
AUSTIN H. JOHNSON.
CAMBRIDGE, February, 1925.
THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SCEPTIC
I propose to start my rambling discourse by taking whatever has
lately been said by Mr. Bernard Shaw and say the opposite.
You will forgive me therefore if in this very disconnected discourse
the starting point, and in a sense the text, is found in the recent
work of my old friend and enemy. I suppose everybody here has
heard of, and most people have probably either read or seen,
the very interesting play called St. Joan; and I am not going
to take up the function of the hundreds of young dramatic critics
that I see before me by attempting to deal with it as a play,
because my concern with it is only in one particular; but I will say
by way of indicating my own general view of the subject that when I
had read and seen it I wrote to my friend Bernard Shaw to ask him
when his play on the subject of Joanna Southcott was coming out.
That is a taunt which may appear to you somewhat cryptic and obscure,
but it is really I think very relevant. You know that all sorts
of things have been said about St. Joan of Arc at various periods.
Shakespeare unfortunately represented her as a repulsive
female adventurer; Voltaire, as something indescribable; Lord Byron said
she was a fanatical strumpet; and Bernard Shaw has said that she was a
Protestant progressive, and the founder as it were of the modern world.
You will notice that it is only that last insult which is represented
as having made her turn in her grave and rise indignant from the dead.
None of the other descriptions of St. Joan, as far as I know,
ever concerned themselves with the ghost of St. Joan returning
to the earth--it required a further and terrible accusation to stir
those sacred bones even in imagination; and the suggestion that she
was responsible for the modern world was too much for anybody.
But there is one particular passage in that play which will serve
very well as a starting point for the little that I want to suggest
this evening, and that is the fine passage of that very fair
argument on the subject of persecution, in which the inquisitor,
if I remember right, says, very truly as I think, that errors grow
with an astonishing rapidity and with a bizarre variety that nobody
could expect, and that some movement that began with an apparently
well-meaning and simple man suggesting certain apparently more or less
harmless things, will rapidly end with people committing some crime
like infanticide, or insisting on going about without clothes.
Now the only reason I am not going to discuss all the very interesting
questions that are raised on that point in the argument is that it
seems to me--and that is the point of my reference to Joanna Southcott--
it seems to me that Bernard Shaw proves too much, I mean he proves too
much for his own purpose, because he succeeds, I think, in convincing
a fair and reasonable reader that if it was true that Joan of Arc
stood for indvidualism in religion, and the right of each person
to oppose his voice or his voices to the general sense of Christendom,
if Joan of Arc meant that then she was wrong, and that is all.
I do not mean that I think she was wrong, but that Benard Shaw
thinks that she was wrong. There is nowhere in the wole of
the play anything of the nature of a real answer to the Inquisitor
or the Archbishop upon the common sense of the question.
Joan of Arc does not prove that it would be a good thing for everybody
to follow a purely individualistic religion; she does not attempt to.
The argument really remains on the other side. In other words,
if she did maintain that view, she was wrong, and if she maintained
the view that anyone who has a psychical experience must trust
that against common sense and against civilisation, to say nothing
of any other authority--if she maintained that, she was wrong,
wrong by the consensus of common sense people everywhere.
Because as we all know there are a large number of people by this
time hearing voices which sometimes say very singular things,
and a great many of those people do so far illustrate the general
subject that I am attempting to suggest this evening, that they were
a great many of them at one time sceptics of the most complete sort.
It is not specially of them that I want to speak this evening,
but it is well to note as we pass that in the ordinary literal sense
of the words we have seen a great many very great sceptics pass into
what a good many of us at any rate would call very great superstitions.
We have seen great men of science, for instance, who were
agnostics or materalists, telling us things for which certainly
the rationalists of the nineteenth century and still more of the
eighteenth century could have found no term except raving madness.
I mean men who doubted a great deal more than I ever doubted
have come to believe more than I could possibly believe.
We have seen people who thought it fantastical to believe that there
could be a resurrection of a glorfied body come to tell us of
the resurrection of glorified niblicks and brassies for the purpose
of playing a game of glorified golf. We have seen people who could
not believe in the Sacramental mystery that was symbolised by the old
legend of the Holy Grail, gravely tell us that people in the world
of happy souls still have whiskies and sodas. It seems to me,
by the way, rather characteristic of the rather third-rade character
of that sort of religion, that they do say whiskies and sodas when they
might at least be poetical and traditional and say ale or wine.
But that is an unimportant point. I say merely in passing that we
know the theory that each person should trust his psychical experience
as an absolute, and ask for no other view and allow nothing to balance
it or to moderate it at all; that view has developed very fully
in the modern world, and most of us when we see it do not like it.
It developed of course in a great many ways; apart from the present
development of things like spirtualism it developed in a great many
sects and leaders of various sorts; and that was what I meant when I
asked Bernard Shaw why he shows this coldness, this neglect amounting
almost to indifference, of the greatness of Joanna Southcott.
Joanna Southcott is surely a far better example of pure individualism
of religion, of a person who listens solely to her own voices,
of a person who would not let any priest or council come between
her and God; and she is moreover, a person much nearer to us,
our fellow country-woman, and we are not obliged in honouring
her to do what I know is always very painful to the friends of
the international friendship of nations--pay a compliment to France.
We are not obliged to go back a great many more years in the past
than the life of Methusaleh in the future, and we have not reached
things so remote or so obscure or so alien. We can find quite
within our own time a great prophetess who stood up and declared
with absolute clarity certain oracles of spiritual sources,
and who has actually left her testament behind her; I believe there
are some boxes or something that nobody has opened yet and they
may contain news of prodigious spiritual value to the world.
Why, in other words, if Bernard Shaw's ideal is the modern ideal,
why does he have to go back to the medieval world to get it?
And why does he describe in the play of Methusaleh infinite ages
stretching forward into conditions that seem to me to be full
of more and more depression, and have to go back 500 years to find
inspiration and hope? The reason, I take it, is that all common
sense people are really now agreed that the mere individual
mysticism that relies upon the internal voices and nothing else
is certainly wrong ninety-nine times that it is right once, and is
when left to itself an anarchical and insane element in society.
But I do not speak specially of those cases like that of Joanna Soutchott,
except in passing, because the thing I have to deal with this evening
is not the ordinary excesses or extravagances of belief, but a certain
element of credulity that strangely enough seems to me to come
with and to a large extent to arise out of the mode of scepticism.
As I say, it is illustrated sufficiently well in actual fact in
the case of the remarkable appearance of scientists as spiritualists.
But I am not dealing with that, but with somethiing that is considerably
more difficult to describe; and I must ask your indulgence if I do not
make it as clear as I should wish to, because it is a rather large
question and one that covers several centuries, and requires something
like a little historical imagination, I think, to see it as a whole.
When St. Joan was dead and the medieval order broke up, we all know
that for good or evil there did come into the world an intellectual
and religious disruption, whether we call it variety or anarchy,
or by the language of praise or blame--call it if you like invidiualism;
and to a very great extent it was not only individualism, but scepticism.
Now when the Inquisitor in Bernard Shaw's play, whose words I have taken
as a text, says that if you allow people spiritual individualism,
without sang froid as it were, and without anything to balance it,
you will have wild things like people walking about without clothes;
he said something that has been illustrated often enough
in human history. It seems to me in a certain sense he rather
understates the case, because the thing that I wish to point out to you
this evening is that when you leave everything in a more or less
sceptical and undecided condition, what happens is not necessarily,
or perhaps even generally, extravagance and madness, but in a sense
the very opposite. What happens is constraint and servitude,
that is to say, that one of the immediate results of cutting loose is,
for some reason that I do not understand, that you chain yourself
up again and chain yourself much more completely. In other words,
whatever the old system of Christendom may have been and whatever
we think of it, it is historically true that when people broke away
from it they showed a most mysterious disposition for rushing,
apparently of their own free will, into prisons and lunatic asylums,
especially lunatic asylums, but lunatic asylums are prisons; and it
is that aspect of them I am thinking of especially at the moment.
It is as if one were to write a story about a man who had the rather
neverous job of leading along on some journey a companion who
had a morbid mono-mania for going to prison. One could imagine
rather an amusing story made out of it, how you had to get him
past police stations as they get drunkards past public houses.
Something of that mysterious impulse seems for some reason or other
to exist in the human intellect when it is emancipated or made
sceptical or detached, or whatever phrase you may use; and I want
very rapidly, if it does not bore you, to point out how curiously
that has happend again and again in the last two or three centuries
of our era.
Of course the first and most obvious example is that when
the intellect was as it were left floating loose--and it
must always be remembered that I have no intention of going
into it in any detail--it must always be remembered as a
historical fact that the interregnum of the Renaissance
and of the general system of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was very much of an intellectual interregnum.
That is to say, there was a considerable period before
the formation of a possible new system like the Puritan system,
a period during which large numbers of people were floating
about very much as they are floating about in the world to-day,
people whose spirit I suppose was represented by Montaigne
or by some of the Italian cultured sceptics of the time;
and therefore you did have a period when there was a great deal
of what one may call scepticism in the air, and the final
form of modern Europe had by no means been yet taken.
What happened for instance in the countries like our own
and in Scotland and in parts of Germany and in Holland,
was a very extraordinary thing, which Matthew Arnold, you remember,
summed up by saying the English people entered the prison
of Puritanism and had the key turned on them for 200 years.
It is perhaps an exaggeration to say the English people entered it,
and it is perhaps an exaggeration to say they were there for
200 years. But it may be stated, broadly speaking, as true.
You will notice that Matthew Arnold, who was certainly detached
and in many ways in sympathy with the change, used also the
word "prison," which is the key of what I am insisting on.
A large mass of people became so extraordinarily interested,
for some reason that I have never quite understood, in one
particular thin thread of argument, the logical argument
from the omnipotence of God to the full Calvinist doctrine
of predestination--became so extraordinarily interested in
that one particular piece of Calvinistic logic, that they did
to a very great extent transform the whole of social life as far
as they could with a new atmosphere and a new spirit, and put upon
themselves all kinds of very real and very rigid limitations.
I will not go into all those, because it raises rather an old
controversy which is not really relevant; but it is enough to say
that it is quite obvious that the people did feel the bonds as bonds.
I am not sneering at them for that. Every man who has a
religion feels some of its bonds as bonds at certain moments.
But I am pointing out that these people had drifted into
a system of which the bondage was very severe indeed.
Nobody can read any of the great Puritans like Milton, etc.,
without feeling that there is a distinct resistance or struggle
of Puritan humanity against the limits of the new system.
But all I am concerned to point out in connection with this argument
is that what had landed them in that severe and gloomy system
overshadowed a vast part of our people until a very short time ago.
If you read almost all of the great nineteeth century humanitarians,
people like Dickens or Hood, or any of the hundred others
who lived to preach a more generous and liberal conception
of human pleasure, you will almost always find that they talk
of the last generation as having been practically Calvinistic.
They talk of the life of the old home or the family traditions,
as if they were Puritanical in the most gloomy degree.
Therefore I say that that influence--a very restricting
influence--was (and that is the point which I am concerned
with here) the direct immediate result of breaking loose,
and what was called thinking for yourself. It was there
religous liberty that created their social slavery.
Now the time came towards the end of the seventeenth century
when it became increasingly obvious that this gloomy and grinding
creed was not going to be permanently borne, and people began
to break away from it in various ways, to break out of the prison
into which they had entered voluntarily, to break with great
difficulty out of the prison they had built for themselves;
and you get at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning
of the eighteenth the full growth of modern scepticism in the ordinary
sense of the word, the spirit that applies--as it is conceived--
the humane and rational test to everything, and refuses
superstitions and arbitrary doctrines and all the rest of it.
Now I am going studiously to refrain in this discussion as far as I
can from any terms that can be called terms of abuse as distinct
from terms of history. I could say a vast deal about the Puritans,
and the sort of things that a great many people said about the Puritans
when they were there, the kind of things that Ben Jonson said;
but I am not abusing any of these people; I am trying to trace the course
of what always seemed to me a rather curious course of events.
In the same way as I am not attacking the Puritans, so I am not
attacking the Deists or the Sceptics of the eighteenth century.
On the contrary, it always seems to me that there was something rather
beautiful and touching about that brief interlude of contented Paganism,
during which men thought for a very short time indeed that they
could better be wholly satisfied with this earth and this life.
Bitter as Voltaire was, and foul as he often was, there is about
some of his utterances also the suggestion of a curious innocence.
When he said, "After all, a man must cultivate his garden,"
it always gives me a certain feeling as if it was the garden of
Eden-that curious interlude when man believed that this earth was Eden,
and that by being ordinarily humane and reasonably logical and practical,
all problems would solve themselves. As I say, there is something
beautiful about it, beautiful because it is dead and dead for ever.
I heard a story the other day about a little boy who was asked
to give an account of the story of the Garden of Eden, and said,
"Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful garden, and they were perfectly
happy until the servant came." That seems to me to be one of the few
stories of children's blunders that sounds as if it was really made
by a child, and it happens in this case to be something of a parable,
because one of the many reasons that that optimistic interlude,
which might truly be called the age of reason, one of the reasons why
that optimistic interlude was after all an illusion, and therefore
a fleeting thing, was that it was really in its social and economic
aspect an aristocratic thing. The great Republican Deists of the
eighteenth century--many of them in my opinion very fine men indeed--
were most of them, among other misfortunes, gentlemen, and they
were gentlemen of the sort who lived in a considerable degree
of ignorance of the condition of the rest of the world.
And you will generally find that their philosophy implies a great
deal of leisure and not infrequently a great deal of learning.
In short, that interlude which may be called the age of reason
is in its best and most dignified aspect something like a kind
of romance of youth, a romance of happiness; one may say I think
that the only thing to be said against the age of reason is that it
comes before the age of discretion. And that brief interlude of happy
scepticism was followed by something else that arises out of its
aristocratic character, and its quality of leisure and of learning
and not infrequently of pedantry, and that was of course the gradual
emergence of the tremendous popular problems of to-day. The problems
appeared even to the men of the French Revolution as very much
more simple that they are--they appeared to them as we all know
rather as political than as economic, and though they stood in many
cases for very great truths, the broader truth I think is that it
was impossible to maintain, to go on maintaining, that detached
and dignified attitude of the philosophical gentlemen of the early
and middle eighteenth century. What followed was something else again.
The mind was apparently quite detached and emancipated again.
It was perfectly open to it to do anything or to do nothing,
and what it did once more was to build a prison; it set to work
to create out of that very rationalism that had been its sort
of holiday and romance--to build up that extraordinary structure,
the full individualistic commercial theory. It has many names;
it was called at its earliest stage Utilitarianism; it afterwards came
to be called the Manchester School. But the peculiarity of it that I
wish to point out was that it was very, very hard in its dogmas indeed,
that it limited men on all sides, that it repressed all kinds of
impulses that they would naturally have, such as the impulse of pity,
not to mention the impulse of social indignation; and all objections
to it were answered exactly as Calvinists would have answered
objections to their creed, with the repetition of an iron dogma.
Everyone knows the way in which good and honest men like Cobden
and Bright found it impossible upon their principles to do so simple
a thing as to forbid little children to be tortured in factories.
They said--and again I am not despising the rigidity of the man
who professes these dogmas--he is in many ways an object of respect--
they said, "We have this fixed principle; the State must not
interfere in these things," and they therefore refused an action
which I think would have been consonant to them and all other
decent people as far as their instincts were concerned.
In other words, you have again the same paradox, as it were appearing;
that which was constraining them, which was preventing them from doing
ordinary things such as saving a child from torment or giving a penny
to a beggar in the street--what was preventing them from doing this
was not an ancient tradition or creed, but the cast-iron new system
which they had made themselves, the last discovery of economic science.
It was their free thought that forbade them free action. Therefore twice
you have exactly the same thing repeating itself--a people supposed
to be free and independent in the intellect, elaborately constructing
a system that constrained themselves and constrained them far more
inhumanly and harshly than had any older system in the remote past--
something that restrained ordinary impulsive natural virtues.
It was not religion that constrained Cobden and Bright; it was not
even their Bibles and their Bible type of religion; on the contrary,
their Bibles must have been a considerable embarrassment to them
in that particular problem, because by a curious coincidence one
of those very doctrines that they had inherited from the last prison,
the last cast-iron system, the Puritan system, one of the very
things they had inherited from that, the doctrine of the Sabbath,
was itself an illustration of the thing of which they disapproved.
It was a limitation of hours of labour. So that leaving on one side such
trifles as the idea of being just to the poor or loving your neighbour,
or unimportant things of that sort, even the sacred principle of
the Sabbath really contradicted the theory of the Manchester School.
But they remained true to that theory, and a great many other people
did too. Now since that time we have seen possibly a still more
extraordinary thing. First of all you have the gloomy unworldly religion
of Puritanism established by people as a prison for themselves.
Those people escaping from that, proceeding to build another prison,
staying for a little while in rationalistic optimism, and then building
for themselves another prison of which the whole system was that this
world and material money considerations were the key to everything,
and above all that that prosperity was to be obtained by ruthless
competition and by an absolute refusal of anything like social authority.
I may remark, because it is often forgotten, that the full doctrine
of the Utilitarians was something much more extraordinary than many
people now imagine, much more extraordinary than any tradition
of old-fashioned radicalism to-day, because very great men indeed,
like Adam Smith, laid down in effect the doctrine that if everybody
followed his own self-interest the net result would be some degree
of social happiness; that is to say, they preached a curious
kind of cynical optimism whereby if everybody was for himself,
God and not the Devil would in some way look after all the rest.
That theory was preached as a philosophy and a hard and fast philosophy,
and had all the stringency of a religion as we see when we find
people refusing to do ordinary benevolent actions because they
are against that religion.
Since then we have seen a still more extraordinary thing.
We have seen the whole of that process reversed entirely;
the Manchester School theory, the theory of Utilitarianism,
or whatever you call it, broke down somewhere about the time
when I was a child, and in the world in which I grew up people
had already got used to saying that that was all nonsense,
and they were therefore for the moment for a third time
in that intermediary position of intellectual independence.
They were no longer frightened of factory acts and charity,
and they were to a certain extent free to maintain what they liked.
What they did was to react to the opposite extreme and
immediately to erect that into a new system which was made
of iron and could not be altered, and which was full of dogmas.
We call it the system of Karl Marx; broadly speaking, just as I
am not abusing the Puritans or the Deists or the Utilitarians
so I am not going to abuse the Bolshevists, but just to describe
them and to say that everybody who has ever met a real
Bolshevist or Socialist of the real Marxian tradition will agree
with me in saying that he has again that same characteristic
of an iron rigidity and a refusal to do anything whatever,
however apparently humane, generous or natural or instinctive,
which conflicts with the few fixed dogmas of his economic system.
Therefore as I say, you have had three or four times
(many more times, no doubt, if you went into detail)--at least
three times we have had that curious experience of people who,
by all, in the religious sense were supposed to be perfectly free
and independent, laying upon themselves superstitions and slaveries,
tying themselves up in knots that nobody had put upon them,
like a man who whenever he was let out of the front door immediately
tied himself to a tree or chained himself to the railings.
Only at very light moments, passing moments, has there
been anything resembling a really independent scepticism.
The sceptics themselves have always turned something else into
a sacred object, into a superstition, and when that thing was
examined it was always found to be far narrower than the older
traditions that had been rejected.
In conclusion, I should like to say that there is yet
another development in that curious state of things.
When people emerge in this fashion in the modern world, after all
this succession of building their own prisons and destroying
their own prisons, and then building more prisons--when they
emerge from that they emerge in a curiously chaotic state
of mind in many ways, and nothing is more notable about it than
the fact that they continue to hold a large number of doctrines
some of them quite true, but to hold them as superstitions,
that is to say, in the strict sense, to hold them without reason.
I alluded at the beginning of my remarks to that phrase
of Bernard Shaw's of people going about without clothes.
You will see a good deal of discussion in the newspapers nowadays
about people who are going about with very few clothes, and nothing
I think is more remarkable in that discussion than to notice
the fact that nobody has the slightest idea of what he really holds
on the subject. The whole argument is a chaos of sentimentalism.
Some people say, if it is natural it is beautiful; other people
say if it is beautiful it is right if it is ugly it is wrong,
and the argument as used would lead, in the hands of any logician,
in ten minutes to the obvious conclusion that nobody ought
to wear any clothes at all. We all know that the vast mass of us
would never go in for, let us say, individual moral emancipation
to that extent or in that form; something constrains us,
and I think it would be fair to say that it is a tradition
--in ninety-nine people out of a hundred it is a tradition;
in the strictly intellectual sense it is a supersitition.
It is a superstition because the modern world does not know
why it keeps up these old same traditions of society.
I know, for instance, why I believe in wearing clothes;
I believe in it because I believe in the fall of man,
which does not mean merely the story of Adam and Eve,
but the highly practical and profound philosophy which teaches
us that in man what is natural is not necessarily beautiful,
and certainly not necessarily good; that there are all
sorts of elements and potentialities in man that can
no more be trusted than Bengal tigers or storms at sea.
I am only pointing out to you that I who hold certain doctrines
have reasons for my conventions and decencies (so far as I
observe conventions and decencies)--but such as I have,
I have reason for. Now the vast mass of the sceptical
modern world has no reason at all for its conventions.
Suppose I suddenly say, "What is the matter with cannibalism?"
most of you will simply say that it isn't nice--and you
will be quite right. I am not sneering at tradition, I am
not sneering at it even when I call it supersition; but I say
that to the vast majority of people in a modern civilised state,
cannibalism is in more senses than one a matter of taste.
It is at bottom the fact that you do not fancy a slice of missionary.
Now there again the whole human race, because of its sanity,
its instincts, its traditions, which embody that sanity
in these things, does in fact know in practice that it
is not going to be cannibal; but in a strictly intellectual
sense the attitude is superstitious, because in nine cases
out of ten it does not know why it disapproves of cannibalism.
I know why I disapprove of it--I disapprove because I
believe that man is the image of God, and that he is
different from the brutes in a fundamental and real sense
and that his dignity must be preserved by a separation.
But how many thousands of people nowadays have mixed up
men and animals past any separation or any distinction.
How many of them have anything like a religious dogma or even a
clear ethical dogma distinguishing man from the other creatures.
Yet all of them have the instinct that a man is different from
a brute, and therefore that they do not propose to eat their
grandmother in the economical manner of the Sandwich Islands.
But the thing upon which that idea rests is, believe me,
in almost all of you a tradition; I do not say of you,
because no doubt this room is filled exclusively with clear-headed
logicians who have thought out all their first princples;
but shall we see people in the street outside--many
of them do not know why they believe in wearing clothes,
and do not know why they do not believe in eating men.
And the reason is that they inherited from these old dogmatic
systems that they have thrown away, various framents, most of them
true but inherited from the old systems they have cast aside;
they no longer know what their own foundations are, and if they
trace back all those noble and honourable prejudices to their
really logical origin, I think in nine times out of ten they
will find that they were rooted in the Christian Faith.
THE CORRESPONDENCE
between
The Author and Mr. G.G. Coulton
MR. CHESTERTON'S HISTORY
MR. G.G. COULTON
Mr. Chesterton lectured to us on Monday night upon "The Superstitions
of the Sceptic." When requested to give medieval evidence
for what he implied about the Middle Ages, he replied that it was
the questioner's business to produce that evidence, and promised
that he would meet this as publicly as it might be produced.
I will therefore print as much as the Editor's space allows.
I need not here give references; having done so in other volumes
ad libitum or (as unfriendly critics might say) ad nauseum;
I may fairly throw upon Mr. Chesterton the onus of contradicting
my assertions and calling for further proof, at the risk of further
exposing himself by such contradictions.
He told us, with regard to the Reformation: "One result
of cutting loose is that you chain yourself more completely.
The reformers entered into prisons of their own. . . .
The English people entered the prison of Puritanism. . . . I
could say a vast deal about the Puritans [but I don't want
to spend my time abusing them]. I am trying here to trace
a rather curious course of events. . . . It puzzles me to trace
this course of events [in the history of Puritanism]."
I took down these words, I think I may safely claim, verbatim,
except those in brackets, which I had only time to paraphrase.
Questions were invited, and these references to Puritanism,
chosen from among others which invited almost equally direct
historical criticism, formed the subject of discussion.
Mr. Chesterton was asked whether he could specify a single point
in seventeenth century Puritanism (apart from the doctrine
of Predestination, upon which Puritans themselves often differed)
which was not also orthodox in the Middle Ages. The reply,
which was not easy to follow, implied that monks and ascetics
were the only orthodox medieval Puritans; that general Church
teaching was free then from all Purtianical taint; and especially
that the Middle Ages were ages of dance and innocent mirth.
It is with that presentment that we are concerned here.
Let us take the typical prescriptions of orthodox medieval
Churchmen for the laity, quite apart from the monastic ideal.
And let us take first the subject on which Mr. Chesterton was
so emphatic, and on which, as he said in almost as many words,
he was telling his hearers only things which were familiar
to everybody who had studied actual medieval records.
Let us take the medieval dance.
I know of only two or three exceptional Churchmen in the Middle Ages
who make even the most grudging allowance for dancing as compatible
with Christian morals. Quite typical is that sentence from Augustine
which is repeated from Churchman to Churchman down the Middle Ages,
that it is less sinful even to plough on Sundays than to dance.
The friars themselves, though they of all the clergy (except those humble
parish parsons whose voice has scarcely ever come down to us) had most
symapthy with the village folk--even the friars are dead against dancing.
Dancers are anti-christian, a Church of Malignants; they are possessed
with devils; they dance to the ruin of their souls. They are worse than
the Jews; for these shrank from crucifying Christ on a feast-day, yet it
is precisely the feast days of the Church which men choose for dancing.
One remedy against dancing is "the remedy of fear and reason; to wit,
that we should reflect how this place wherein we are set is a valley
of tears and not of dancing, of wretchedness and not of song."
Dancers should be forcibly restrained by their parents and masters;
they should be deprived of the finery in which they dance,
"as we singe a cat's skin lest she should go caterwauling abroad."
They should even be beaten if recalcitrant; it was Eli's ruin that he did
not beat his unruly sons. The clergy have a right to keep them from
the dance, "even as the King's ministers might restrain their subjects
from conspiring against the King."
Mr. Chesterton has evidently never realised how strongly
St. Francis's love of song and mirth at certain moments contrasts,
not only with the religious world of his day, but even with
the ordinary and reflective St. Francis, the St. Francis who did
not run naked about the streets--for by another strange slip,
he implied to us that running naked was a product of post-reformation
religious imagination, and forgot one of the most striking episodes
in the career of a saint whose biography Mr. Chesterton himself
has put upon the modern market. Again, one of the most Franciscan
of the early friars (outside the circle of contemporaries who had know
the saint personally), is Berthold of Regensburg, whom Roger Bacon
commends as the greatest popular preacher of the thirteenth century.
Berthold quotes Augustine's words against the dancers,
and only adds as a qualification that folk may dance "at bridals"
without sin. Otherwise, they risk mortal sin; he who dies
in mortal sin goes inevitably to hell. A sudden heart-failure
in our partner's arms would land us forthwith in a pace in which we
shall be a thousand times more uncomfortable than if the whole
universe were at white-heat, and we white-hot in the midst of it;
these tortures will be increased a thousandfold again at the Last Day,
when every man will come to his final reward; then they will last
for as many years as all the hairs that have ever grown on all
the beasts that have crawled on this earth since God first made Adam--
and even then, we shall be only at the beginning of our pains.
Moreover, as Aquinas and all the great schoolmen agree, the blessed
in heaven will take pleasure in the contemplation of these our agonies;
not as uncharitable toward us, but accidentaliter, as a glorious
object-lesson of the Justice of God.
It was not quite so sinful merely to take pleasure in
other folks' dancing. The sister of one of the greatest Roman
saints suffered only fifteen days of purgatory "because once,
standing in mine own chamber, I listened with a certain
sweetness to the songs of them that danced in the streets,
for which I did no penance during my earthly life;
wherefore I must now be punished for fifteen days in purgatory."
But then Albert the Great, Aquinas' master, is reported
to have said from experience that he would rather have been
roasted alive with St. Laurence than bear one moment more
of the purgatorial flames.
This attitude towards the dance far outlasted the Reformation
in Roman Catholic countries; a devout parish priest thought
to earn praise from Fenelon for having put down the dance
in his parish; in the villages subject to the great abbey
of St. Peter in the Black Forest, the customal prescribes:
"The parson has the right of forbidding dancing; and when
he chooses to prohibit all dance, then every dancer pays a fine
of three shillings, be it man or woman."
In the face of this, and masses of similar evidence, must we
not conclude that the course of events which so puzzles
Mr. Chesterton is fairly simple? The seventeenth century
puritans tried to enforce what the medieval Church had preached,
but failed to enforce, often even winking at infractions.
Their psychology may have been very defective, but on
these points of theology they were orthodox medievalists;
they agreed with St. Bernard and with at least nine-tenths
of St. Francis.
Let us therefore now put to Mr. Chesterton a counter-question framed on
his own lecture. Can he name a single man of science, who, having gained
a great reputation and a rich income by science, is superstitious enough
to believe that he could write (for instance) a History of England out of
the merest journalistic scraps of historical information? Have not such
ventures of faith been mainly characteristic of brilliant litterateurs?
Goldsmith's histories became a byword almost in the author's lifetime;
and they would lie still deeper in the literary hell if Goldsmith had
written them to serve a religious sect.
Mr. Chesterton will doubtless remember the story (I quote from memory)
of Henry Fielding, who once staved off a few bills more hastily
than usual by writing another play after methods even more
offhand than his wont. The manager, after the first rehearsal,
found the author tobacconing (as our ancestors called it)
by the tavern fire, and protested with great concern:
"This will never do, Mr. Fielding." The author blew a ring,
and replied philosophically: "Well, let the fools find it out!"
Then came the first night, and a storm of hisses, and a desperate,
incoherent manager bursting in again upon the author,
still tobacconising by the same tavern fire. Then Fielding,
who had something not only of Mr. Chesterton's literary genius,
but also of his imperturbable bonhomie, blew another ring,
and remarked: "So the fools have found it out, have they?"
We still read Tom Jones; but that play is probably read,
if at all, only as a curiosity in literary history.
G.G. COULTON.
NOV. 11, 1924.
[From The Cambridge Reivew, November 14, 1924.] MR.
G. K. CHESTERTON'S REPLY
SIR,--It is a very great honour for a journalist to find his views
criticised at all by so dinstinguished a scholar as Mr. Coulton,
and I should like to begin with two apologies to him;
the first for the delay in this reply, which was due to my being
forced to go wandering in Scotland when his criticism was sent
to me, and the second for the circumstances of our too brief
public conversation, to which he refers. I am very sorry, but not
very much surprised, if he only imperfectly understood my answers;
for the truth is that I rather imperfectly heard his questions,
which was due perhaps to some acoustical accident, if I may make
the guess without being a professor of acoustics.
Mr. Coulton, I fear, thinks me a very frivolous person, yet, in truth,
I did not venture upon guesses and generalisations about history
without considering somewhat seriously the problem that it raises,
touching the inevitable inferiority of the amateur to the specialist.
It seems to me a rather difficult problem, with difficulties for
the specialist as well as the amateur. My critic has complimented me
with a comparison to Goldsmith, and certainly there is more real English
history in ten lines of The Deserted Village than in the whole of Hume.
But it is the very depth and darkness of my ignorance that discloses
the difficulty. I am willing to believe that not only Mr. Coulton,
but every other man I meet in Cambridge knows much more than I do.
But in that case how inconvenient and incalculable must be my course
and progress through the Cambridge streets. I must become a modernist
after meeting one man, a medievalist after meeting the next. The man
in the street must be wholly at the mercy of an academic priesthood.
When the priests quarrel, he cannot even cling to the most learned;
for he cannot know which is the most learned without being more learned
than all of them. And as there are specialists about everything, it is
impossible for any ordinary person to form any impression about anything.
Even a Protestant priesthood will hardly demand so complete a surrender
of private judgment. I have reflected; and I think I see the place
of the amateur.
The obscure things, the details and disputed points,
the great scholar can always see and note better than we can.
It is the obvious things that he cannot see. I do not say
this in mere depreciation; I think it is really inseparable
from that conentrated research to which the world owes so much.
It is the truth in the traditional picture of the
absent-minded professor, who remains gazing at a fossil
or a Roman coin and fails to observe external objects,
such as a house on fire, a revolution, an escaped elephant
putting its head through the skylight, and similar things.
Mr Coulton's view of history shows the same limitations;
and it is precisely because I am so much less learned than
he that it is my privilege to lead him through common ways,
pointing out elephants and other enormous objects. For instance,
inferior as I may be in information about the medieval world,
I have as much right as anyone else to form impressions
of the modern world. And I can hardly trust myself blindly
to one who really seems to believe (as does Mr. Coulton)
that the field of "science" is free from journalistic adventures,
amateur experiments, quacks and charlatans, even as this Chesterton.
A man must indeed be imprisoned in the medieval world,
if he does not know that the big public event in modern science
has been the stepping of great specialists like Sir Oliver Lodge
into fields where their foes can call them charlatans.
Similarly, I can only regard with respectful amazement
the spectacle of a capable and cultivated gentleman,
walking about in broad daylight in modern Europe, and stil
quite honestly under the impression (I quote his very words)
that the Catholic Church is a religious sect.
The first obvious question is what it is all about.
If there is one medieval superstition which I admire more
than another it is the habit of our barbarous ancestors
of making it quite clear what they were trying to prove.
I am not sure that I know what Mr. Coulton is trying to prove;
and I am pretty sure he does not know what I am trying to prove.
In the case at issue, my lecture at Cambridge, he knows so little
what I am trying to prove that he actually helps me to prove it.
The brilliant specialist is here so blind to the obvious
that he does not even know what he himself is doing;
in the sense of what he is demonstrating. The thesis of my lecture
(if he will pardon the medieval pedantry of logic) was this:
that the Reformation was followed, not by the intellect finding
freedom, but by its building new and often narrower prisons.
As the first of several examples, I mentioned Puritanism.
My critic merely suggested, in his question, that there
was nothing in Puritanism that there was not in Medievalism,
with the exception of predestination. In his letter he merely
suggests that the Puritans only applied medieval principles,
apparently with more thoroughness. Here, again, he shows
a curious innocence about what he is proving. All that this could
possibly prove is that Catholics were capable of the Renaissance
and Protestants were not; or in other words that the Puritans
dragged the world back when the Popes let it go forward.
As I am not a "medievalist" but a Catholic, I should not
quarrel very much with him for making out this case.
But anyhow he has made out my case. His letter substantially
supports my lecture. By his own account, the Puritans
restored austerity with the addition of predestination.
So far from finding freedom, they forged more efficient chains
with at least one additional chain; Q.E.D.
Now I have never failed to confess freely that I am ignorant
of many such details as my critic adduces about dancing;
though I am not ignorant of the way in which such details
can be selected and arranged by the most honest partisan.
But even by the details as he gives, that some moralists
allowed dancing, that some allowed it at weddings, that some
disallowed it on Sundays, I can see that the case was not
so simple as he suggests; I recognise that Catholic atmosphere
of living complexity that came to be called casuistry.
Probably it is what he means by mentioning (though not explaining)
the Church's habit of "winking"' but he seems to admit that
the puritan never indulged in anything so frivolous as a wink.
But why did the Church wink? However he explains it,
he can only bring out my conclusion; that the schismatics did
not find freedom but more constraint.
And now for the general matter. In my verbal reply,
which he says was not easy to follow, I merely recited what I
should have thought he would have recognised as the ordinary
Catholic theory of different vocations; but if he had, he would
hardly have translated it as "monks and ascetics" being "the only
orthodox medieval Puritans"; or said that it implied in itself
that the Middle Ages were ages of dance and innocent mirth.
Indeed, he himself says that this was merely an implication.
It seems to me odd that a man should base his whole complaint,
not on what was said, but what he thinks was implied, in a
sentence that he could not follow. But anyhow I did not say,
and do not imply what he imagines; certainly not what he answers.
I do not maintain that medieval priests went about like the new
nonconformist preachers, teaching people the Joy of Life. It never
needs to be taught except in depressed and debilitated communities.
I do not maintain that medievalism was all beer and skittles,
or mostly beer and skittles, though I note, as Cobbett did,
that it sometimes condemned men to fast on beer and bread.
For instance, I should never have expected a scholar to glance
at anything so plain and popular as my little book on St. Francis.
But I think it strange that any scholar so acute should look
at anything so plain without understanding what it says.
Mr. Coulton talks as if I ignored the asceticism of St. Francis
and his age, and connected him merely with art and song.
Having written a whole book almost entirely to show that St. Francis
was an ascetic, and not (as his modern admirers suggest)
merely a votary of art and song, I cannot but accept this result
of my effort with a gentle sigh.
Anybody can look and see what I did say about a general ascetical
atmosphere that preceded and surrounded St. Francis and doubtless
lingered long after him. I compared it to a black cave
and a howling wilderness, to a world without stars or flowers,
to the fires of purgatory and the fasts that cast out devils;
and various other things not commonly identified with dance
and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth. I do not see how I could
have put it more strongly; and I can only respectfully hope that
Mr. Coulton reads medieval books more carefully than modern books.
The only difference is that I gave something like a reasonable
reason for human beings behaving in so strange a way;
whereas he can only fall back on the old unhistorical
Protestant method of treating it as a nightmare from nowhere.
And that brings me to the vital point at issue.
The general thesis I should maintain might be stated thus:
"Medieval religion, including medieval asceticism, was totally
different from Puritanism, was indeed contrary to Puritanism,
and was certainly much less gloomy than Puritanism.
It was different in meaning, different in motive, different in
atmosphere and different in effect. The two things were so
diverse that even when they were the same they were different;
as different as a Catholic and an atheist vegetarian when they
both refuse meat on Friday."
What is the matter with my critic's general view is that it
is incredible. It is incredible by a thousand converging things
that make up common sense. I will choose only one at random.
It is inconsistent with the stark outstanding fact of the
figure that the Puritan cuts in history. I mean the effect
of the Puritan, as it is felt in life and literature.
Men like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson had fathers or grandfathers
who must have remembered the old medieval routine at it remained
after the Wars of the Roses. Even if the Renaissance had
penetrated every byeway of the north (which seems most unlikely)
the interruption must have been very recent and very brief.
Tradition must still have been full of the momentum
of the long medieval memories. Under these circumstances,
if the Puritans had only been like medieval priests,
they would have been noticed as being like medieval priests.
The tone of the comments on them would have been "Oh Lord,
here are the dismal old shavelings back again."
It was totally different. The tone of the comments was "Who
ever heard of such nonsense as these new religious people
are talking?" So Shakespeare's characters, who accept a friar
as something familiar and presumably friendly, will talk
of Malvolio being a Puritan as if it were a sort of monster.
It is to me simply incredible, as a mere matter of human nature,
that people should speak thus of a new thing if all the old things
had been exactly like it. I believe that Mr. Coulton has done me
the honour to say that I regard history as a branch of fiction.
It is one of the talents of the scholar to discover truths
that he does not understand. I have read one book of
history to his hundred; but I have one advantage over him.
I can read a book of history as naturally as if it were a novel.
I can remember that it consists of human beings as real as
those in a novel. Now suppose somebody applied this principle,
say, to David Copperfield; suppose somebody said that Peggoty,
being an old-fashioned nurse, had probably treated David
quite as harshly as the Murdstones or Mr. Creakle.
We should simply know it was not so; because, if it had been so,
the stepfather's regime would never have seemed to David a new
and unnatural reign of terror. Nor would the Puritans have been
even felt as Puritans, if they had been the same as priests.
This is a very good example of what I mean by the invisible elephant;
the colossal lump of common sense that seems to be too large
for specialists to see. But this is only one of a thousand
such things, all pointing to the same common sense conclusion.
Why did the Puritan reformers carefully cut out of the old
theology exactly those things that lent themselves
to a more lenient treatment of lighter weaknesses?
Our Lady was popularly conceived as almost illogically indulgent
insinuating a finger on the scale in the weighing of souls,
saving the drunken monk from the punishment of his folly.
They cut her out. Purgatory was conceived as the place
of expiation for venial sins, with a background of hope.
They cut it out. Why, putting aside secular things,
were the colours even of religious things so much more cheerful
for the medieval than for the Puritan? Why was a Catholic
prayer-meeting a gayer spectacle than a Puritan banquet?
All these and numberless other questions will besiege the mind;
but I must not take too much of your space. I will conclude
with the fundamental fact that is the answer to them all.
The most obvious of all the obvious things is the world a man lives in.
The universe is the supreme example of a thing that is too obvious to
be seen; and Mr. Coulton forgets all about it. He said that medievalism
and Puritanism were much the same "except for predestination,"
as if (heaven help us) it were a sort of parenthesis. No man who
says that as a parenthesis understands religious history at all.
The man who separated himself from Christendom, to concentrate on
his one conviction of predestination, lived in a separate universe.
In one sense, perhaps, he was not so much troubled as the priest
about sin, because not so much troubled about free-will. But
his tone, his terminology, his taste in colour and the rest were
more sombre, simply because his sense of sin was a sense of doom.
For it is always the fundamental things that are superficial;
and subconscious convictions appear in the idiom and the voice.
The chasm between the cosmic convictions is far more real than all
the very disputable and variable casuistry about things like dancing.
Even with the little knowledge I have, I could have guessed
for myself that the majority of medieval moralisings would have
deplored various dances in various degrees; in what precise degree
Mr. Coulton does not make clear, for he seems to be unconscious
of the difference between a sin and an occasion of sin.
But suppose that, not many priests, or most priests,
but all priests had denounced it, suppose (absurd as it is)
that the Church denounced dancing as it does stealing, suppose any
extravagance along the lines he mentioned . . . and still you would
not be within a thousand miles of the thing we mean when we call
Calvinism gloomy. You would not be in the same world with it.
A Catholic theologian would have a good deal to say about the dancer
who died of heart-failure and went to hell; and the simplification
savours somewhat of Hyde Park. But the point is that a Calvinist
theologian would simplify it in another and annihilating sense.
The priest would only be warding off a blow of the devil in what was
(in the most exact sense) a free fight. He would be the very
antithesis of the Puritan; whose whole point was that God had made
the man and the sin and the dance and the death and everything else,
with the deliberate purpose of making the man dance his way
to the devil for the divine glory. The Puritan was more gloomy,
simply because this view is more gloomy. To put it shortly,
the ascetic only said, "The Day of Judgment is at hand."
The Calvinist really said, "The Day of Judgment is over; let the earth
keep silence before the Lord." That is the Scottish Sabbath.
That is what is meant by living in a different world.
May I conclude by saying that, among the obvious things,
there are indeed some things that are obvious to us and which we
cannot expect to be obvious to him. Every Catholic of course
understands quite easily, and from the inside, all the things
that Mr. Coulton cannot even on his own principles explain.
Every Catholic knows quite well why the huge power of the old
Church was in fact felt as less oppressive than the brief
coup d'etat of the Puritans; why from the very colours of art
or outline of architecture a man could tell the difference
a mile off; why Catholicism showed a humanistic indulgence
long before Protestantism; and why a thousand denunciations
do not make one damnation.
But, broadly speaking, I will say this. Nobody will ever get any
notion of what the Catholic Church is all about, if he is content
to quote separate definitions because they sound very definite,
and then makes his own deductions from what he imagines that they mean.
All Catholicism is a balance, made of definitions that correct
each other and to some seem to contradict each other. The heretic,
such as the Calvinist, is not a man who has this or that thought,
but a man who separates himself from others that he may think of
nothing else. Thus, if we were to take all modern Catholic sermons
about peace, we should probably find the vast majority merely pacific
and even platitudinous; very few of them directly supporting war.
But anybody who inferred that Catholics were exactly like Quakers,
would have distressing adventures when he got among the Italians
or the Irish. The Quaker was not a man who loved peace but a man
who loved peace more than unity. The Puritan was not merely a man
who had elements of Puritanism; he was a man who rejected all
other elements in order to have his Puritanism pure. There might
really seem at times to be something Calvinist about a Catholic.
But there was nothing Catholic about a Calvinist. Calamity awaits
anybody who tries to infer from one dictum, without the balancing dictum,
what Catholics are like, instead of looking to see what they are like.
We might well take the gay apologue of Mr. Coulton; the little idyll
of hell, heart-disease and the dance of death. If a dancer dropped down
dead shrieking blasphemies under all the conditions defined as sending
a man to the devil, Mr. Coulton (an ardent but ill-instructed convert)
would suddenly find himself forbidden to say that the man had gone there.
I daresay he would be a little bewildered; but I don't blame him.
But there are inconveniences in writing the most learned book about
five centuries of religion without knowing what the religion was.
Yours, etc., G.K. CHESTERTON.
[From The Cambridge Review, December 3, 1924.] FR.
JOHN LOPES WRITES
SIR,--In his article on "Mr Chesterton's History" in your
issue of November 14, Dr. Coulton quotes St. Thomas Aquinas
as a representative medieval authority on the subject of Hell.
May I ask him if he will accept St. Thomas as an equally
trustworthy witness to the teaching of the medieval Church
on the subject of Dancing? If so, the following passage would
seem to justify the careful distinction made by Mr. G.K.
Chesterton in his answer to Dr. Coulton's question on the subject
at the Guildhall lecture.
Yours, etc., JOHN LOPES. 2, Round Church Street, Cambridge.
"Deinde quaeritur de ludis chorealibus, utrum sine peccato
exerceri possint, propter illud quod dicit: 'Et plaudebant':
arguit enim hoc tamquam peccatum.
"Ad quod dicendum, quod ludus secundum se non est malus;
aliter in ludis non esset virtus quae dicitur, eutrapelia:
sed secundum quod ordinatur diverson fine, et vestitur
diversis circumstantiis, potest esse actus virtutis et vitii.
Quia enim impossible est semper agere in vita activa et contemplativa;
ideo oportet interdum gaudia curis interponere, ne animus nimia
severitate frangatur, et ut homo proptius vacet ad opera virtutum.
Et si tali fine fiat de ludis cum aliis circumstantiis,
erit actus virtutis, et poterit esse meritorius, si gratia inforetur.
Istae autum circumstantiae videntur in ludo choreali observandae:
ut non sit persona indecens, sicut clericus, vel religiosus;
ut sit tempore laetitiae, ut liberationis gratia, vel in nuptiis,
et hujusmodi: ut fiat cum honestis personis, et cum honesto cantu;
et quod gestus non sint nimis lascivi, et si qua hujusmodi sunt.
Si autem fiant ad provocandum lasciviam, et secundum alias circumstantias,
constat quod actus vitiosus erit."
Sancti Thomae Aquinatis In Isaiam prophetam expositio. Caput Tertium.
Omnia Opera. Vol. 14. P. 445. Parmae, MDCCCLXIII.
[As this is our last number this term, we have passed the above
to Mr. Coulton, and print his reply in the next column.--ED. C.R.]
[From The Cambridge Review, December 3, 1924.] MR.G.G. COULTON REJOINS
SIR,--I did not quote Aquinas as a "a representative medieval authority";
on the contrary, he is the most moderate of the great schoolmen,
and represents the minimum of medieval Puritanism; e.g. he is
far less emphatic than his contemporary, St. Bonaventura,
as to the pleasure felt by the blessed in watching the writhing
of sinners in hell beneath their feet. And I am glad to see
that he shows equal moderation in the matter of the dance;
this is distinctly the least unfavourable judgment I have yet seen.
Yet, even so, what does Aquinas allow? To avoid sin, the dance must
be done "at a time of rejoicing, as, for instance, for the sake
of liberation, or at weddings and such like; it should be done
with respectable persons and respectable song," and so on.
This is simply abbreviated from Aquinas's own master, Albert the Great
(in lib. IV. Sent. dist. 16). In Albert, it is essential to morality
that dances should be "at due time of rejoicing, as at weddings
or in time of victory, or of a man's personal liberation or that of
his country, or the home-coming of a friend from some far-off land."
Neither Aquinas nor Albert think of suggesting the ordinary Sunday
or holy-day as a time for lawful dances, and, indeed, later Church
law explicitly excluded such occasions: "They who dance on Church
holidays commit mortal sin," writes Luther's adversary and
Aquinas's fellow-Dominican, Guillaume Pepin (Destruct Ninive, Serm.
17); and again: "It is not permitted to any of the faithful to
dance publicly on holy-days or Sundays" (Richard et Giraud, Bib.
Sacree s.v. danse). Again, with regard to the "respectable songs,"
Albert is quite explicit: "That the songs and music which excite
[the dancers] on such occasions should not be of the unlawful kind,
but songs of moral matters or concerning God." There is nothing
in Aquinas or Albert, therefore, which a Puritan like Milton could
not have echoed; even Joanna Soutchott would have permitted dance,
with songs about God, on the day when the Bishops opened her Box.
Aquinas is, no doubt, in full accord with Father Lopes'
own moderate views, but I contend that he gives no justification
whatever for the paradoxes with which Mr. Chesterton entertained us.
G.G. COULTON Nov. 29, 1924.
[From The Cambridge Review, December 3, 1924.] MR.
G.G. COULTON CONTINUES
SIR,--I find nothing of importance in Mr. Chesterton's five columns
which does not depend upon his putting into my mouth things which I
neither said, nor should have been likely to say, unless I had plunged
very thoughtlessly into this important subject.
The issue is very simple. Mr Chesterton insisted on Puritanism
as a post-Reformation product; "it was their religious liberty
that created the social slavery"; therefore our discussion turned
on the attitude of the Medieval Church towards the dance.
Since Mr. Chesterton here complains that "Mr. Coulton does not
make clear" those degrees of casuistry about dancing which he assumes
to be "very disputable and variable," and since it is an academic
prejudice at Cambridge that one of two disputants should stick
to the point, therefore I crave for space for further quotations,
which may possibly entertain some of your readers.
Medieval casuistry about the dance is astoundingly free
from variation. Fr. Lopes has printed what, so far as he or I know,
is the least unfavourable pronouncement to be found among
the whole mass of medieval moralists; yet this goes no farther
than the puritan Milton would have gone. The question here is
not whether there were good moral reasons for the prohibition
of the village dance, but simply whether that prohibition
was invented in the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century;
and Mr. Chesterton needed only to look into The Catholic Encyclopedia
to realize how rash his own assumptions were.
This Encyclopedia, guaranteed by full ecclesiastical license
and imprimatur, does not dare, even at the present day,
to go beyond what Aquinas and Milton would have allowed.
(Vol. IV., p. 619.) "As to social dancing, now so much in vogue,
whilst in itself it is an indifferent act, moralists are
inclined to place it under the ban, on account of the various
dangers associated with it. Undoubtedly old national dances,
in which the performers stand apart, hardly, if at all,
holding the partner's hand, fall under clerical censure
scarcely more than any other kind of social intercourse.
But, aside from the concomitants--lace, late hours,
decollete, escorting, etc.--common to all such entertainments,
round dances, although they may possibly be carried on with
decorum and modesty, are regarded by moralists as fraught,
by their very nature, with the greatest danger to morals."
Four other Catholic theological dictionaries say very much the same;
it is only the three Protestant dictionaries that are really
tolerant of the dance. But the most interesting of all is
a little mongraph which I picked up on a French bokstall:
Some Words about Modern Dances, by le Vicomte de St. Laurent,
who claims the support of the Bishop of Bayeux. (3rd. ed.
Paris, 1857.) He treats it as "a matter of life and death for
Christian morality" (p. 8). "Read Monsignor Bouvier's Theology;
it will teach you that the waltz is a mortal sin in itself. . . .
In fact, when the man is a Christian and his partner also,
his hand only leans flat against her waist, the edge of it
resting on the founces of her crinoline. I consider this fashion
very immoral, but it is the decentest and rarest fashion" (22-4).
The waltz is tolerated because it is a rich man's sin.
"Ye poor peasants, whose dances (less dangerous than this)
are so often anathematised by your priests from the pulpit,
what do you say when you see this same priest entertained
at the chateau, where the biggest landowner in the parish
lets his town friends dance and polk?" (34). The poor are
saying "Bah! the priests let the rich do what they like,
in order to get money out of them to build their churches!"
(62). And he protests, in words which might have come from
a medieval moralist, against the sin of winking in practice
at what the Church condemns in theory (57-8). For here is
the point at which I am least able to follow Mr. Chesterton.
He defends "the Church's habit of 'winking'" at those dances
which she publicly forbade; here, he says, "I recognise
that Catholic atmosphere of living complexity that came to be
called casuistry." If these words are to be taken seriously,
and not merely as an embarrased debater's improvisation,
then the greatest Catholics of the Middle Ages would have
repudiated his plea even more unreservedly, perhaps, than I do.
I could easily fill a whole number of The Review
with ecclesiastical prohibitions; and it astonishes me
even in Mr. Chesterton that he should have had no inkling
of these things when he undertook to write social history.
Moreover, he seems equally ignorant of what the schoolmen really
taught concerning predestination. How can one argue seriously
with a sectarian advocate who complacently ignores the greatest
scholars of his own sect in those far-off days when it included,
with comparitvely few exceptions, the ablest and most learned
minds in Western Europe? For he must permit me to follow
The Oxford English Dictionary, and to bracket his creed with
other sects. The fact that he himself prefers to employ that
term only as a reproach to outsiders does not really help him;
on the contrary, your sectarian par excellence is your exclusivist,
who calls other creeds by names which (he thanks God) cannot apply
to his own. However, Mr. Chesterton may prefer to name things,
these remain what they are; and he may learn from Bossuet,
the greatest Catholic controversialist of all time, that "the
worst intellectual vice is the vice of thinking that things are,
just because we should like them to be."
He "hopes I read medieval books more carefully" than I have read
his St. Francis. I never reead, nor pretended to have read,
that book. I simply pointed out that this Guildhall lecturer,
who ignored one of the most startling and familiar events in
Francis's career, was one who had written a life of St. Francis.
Finally, he protests against non-Catholics even pretending to
understand Catholics. In one sense, I grant this with alacrity,
and am prepared to go even beyond what Mr. Chesterton postulates.
It would need not only a Catholic, but one of rare psychological
gifts and casuistic experience, to follow these five columns
and summarise their fundamental sense without lapsing into
historical nonsense. So far I go; but I respectfully decline
to stop half-way, for reasons which I have stated on the first
page of a recent book of which he has evidently read the title.
If indeed it is forbidden to non-Catholics to attempt to understand
and describe the thoughts of Catholics, then (I there argue)
this "would land us in the logical absurdity of abandoning
Mormon history to the Mormons, Bolshevism to the Bolsheviks,
and why not even botany to the plants?"
G.G. COULTON. St. John's College, Dec. 4, 1924.
[From The Cambridge Review, December 4, 1924.] MR.
G.K. CHESTERTON REPLIES
SIR,--What are we to do with a man who is always reading and has
never learnt to read? Well, if Mr. Coulton really cannot recognise
common sense as useful in history, I will leave the large
ground and meet him on his own ground. Naturally, I cannot
straighten out all the details he makes crooked; he must continue
laboriously transcribing "moral danger" and "mortal sin"
and calling it irrelevant to be told what his words mean.
I must keep a straight face while he hovers round a French bookstall,
picking up something by a real viscount who thought he was
supported by a real bishop in his dislike of waltzing.
Lord Byron's modesty blushed at waltzing; but I refrain, with iron
magnanimity, from pressing this point against Protestantism.
Our critic must tell his interminable anecdotes, regularly missing
the point of each, like that excellent point about popular
dances being more dignified than aristocratic ones.
I cannot track a thousand errors in a thousand words.
But if he demands details, I will take one detail:
the text from St. Thomas Aquinas. Granted there are numberless
documents I cannot check; hut here is one I can check.
And if he deals with all the others as deals with this one,
I cheerfully hold myself free to doubt all his conclusions
from beginning to end.
This debate arose as follows. I said the Puritan was
narrower than the Catholic; I never said a word about
dance-prohibition being "invented in the sixteenth century."
Mr. Coulton invented the dancing test; and said he could
hardly find the most gruding medieval toleration of dances.
At the most, he could not find anything more than that.
In other words, he could not find St. Thomas Aquinas in his
famous medieval library. When that little-known writer was
discovered for him, the authority flatly contradicted him.
St. Thomas does not condemn dancing in any sense whatever.
He does not allow it grudgingly. He does not confine it to weddings.
He does not do anything that all medievals were described
by Mr. Coulton as doing. He recommends it as normally necessary
and sometimes meritorious, both in the common and the mystical sense;
and that not only as a mystical exercise, but as done
with the common motive of refreshing men for their duty.
For the rest, all sane men would say dancing should be
done at appropriate times and with appropriate people.
Most would say a Bishop had better not copy the Bishop of Rumtifoo.
When a man uses so general a phrase as "times of joy,
thanksgivings for liberty, weddings and things of that sort,"
it is obvious that he means "Don't be always dancing,
but dance on due occasions." Why say "hujusmodi" at all,
if he does not mean that?
Challanged by this fact, my critic gave a wonderful exhibition
of "an embarrassed debater's improvisation." He tried desperately
to suggest that St. Thomas can hardly have exactly meant what he said.
Apparently he must have meant what somebody else said.
He must have been "abbreviating" Albertus Magnus, alleged to
demand that all such things should be didactic or devotional.
But if that was what Albertus said, then most certainly St. Thomas was
not repeating what Albertus said. The context conclusively proves it.
Whatever else St. Thomas was, he was not quite so inconsequent
as Mrs. Nickleby. There was commonly some connection between
the end of a sentence and the beginning. And a statement running:
"You cannot always be serious; you must have relaxations; see that
your utterances are all in praise of God" would amount to saying,
"You must sometimes relax; so don't ever relax." Moreover, the critic
has entangled himself hopelessly by trying to prove too much.
If the whole thing was didactic or devotional, why was it improper
for a priest to take part in it?
All his arguments are like that; but I think that sample
will be conclusive. I do not know whether Albertus really
meant a theological song; not to mention a theological dance.
Was a man to stand on one leg in an attitude expressive of
Efficient Grace? But suppose I enquire and find he is wrong
about Albertus as he is wrong about Aquinas. Then he will
tell me the views of Albertus are not to be found in Albertus
but in Anselm; those of Anselm not in Anselm, but in Athanasius;
and so on, from refuge to refuge, back to some cavern with a
Coptic inscription which (were we learned enough to read it)
would cure us of our common delusion that men generally put
their own opinions into their own books.
That is his method; for the rest, I never dreamed of basing
my case on things only Catholics can understand, save as they
are things Mr. Coulton cannot explain. One of them is
what he calls "winking," and I call a sense of proportion;
and nobody will be surprised at his not understanding that.
I say the Roman Church is not a sect as the Roman Empire
was not a small nationality. I like small nationalities;
but it was not. I could correct every sentence thus;
but I have preferred to clear up one concrete case.
Given time and space, I could dispose of his whole tangle
of tail-foremost facts as easily.
Yours, etc.,
G.K. CHESTERTON.
[From The Cambridge Review, January 16, 1925.]
The Cambridge Review closed the discussion on January 16th.
It was agreed between Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Coulton
that they should be allowed one more letter each.
These letters are printed below.--A.H.J.
MR. COULTON'S FINAL LETTER
The Guildhall discussion turned on Puritanism; I took the dance
as a test case, and have therefore stuck mainly to that. Readers must
judge whether it supports Mr. Chesterton's theory that the Church did
not preach Puritanism to the people at large before the Reformation.
If Mr. Chesterton thinks I am unable to meet the other points he raises,
either on the platform or in print, he knows where to find me.
He still relies on inexcusably careless distortions of other men's words.
The Viscount says nothing whatever about "more dignified" dances;
his words are "less dangerous," which lend no justification whatever
for Mr. Chesterton's "excellent point." St. Thomas Aquinas
does not "recommend [the dance] as normally necessary."
He recommends sport in general, ludus; then, coming to this questionable
sport of the dance (ludus chorealis), he insists on narrower
limitations than some seventeenth century Puritans would have fixed.
His direct master in philsophy, Albert, had suggested only four
concrete instances of permissable occasions for dance, all four,
by their very nature, rare. Aquinas, following his master very closely
at every point, mentions two of Albert's permissable occasions, and adds,
"and such like." Mr. Chesterton argues that these other like occasions
are not like the two he has taken from Albert and the two he has omitted,
but must really have been unlike in one important particular;
they must have been not rare but frequent; and therefore a sentence
which merely tolerates dance on two rare occasions "and such like"
may be described as "recommending it as normally necessary."
I am grateful to Mr. Chesterton for his reminder of Mrs. Nickleby.
MR. CHESTERTON'S FINALY REPLY
I may well depart with warm thanks to Mr. Coulton for
confirming my views. It is part of the fun, of course,
that he should split two more of his strange straws.
The Viscount never mentioned dignity; I never said he did.
For the rest, Mr. Coulton argued that even Puritans might
permit dancing on occasions that were religious. He now says
the occasions named were rare. I say St. Thomas was manifestly
not talking of dances that were religious and not thinking of
things that were rare. He plainly says we should "intersperse"
or scatter these things through our lives, to avoid fatigue.
A man could not avert a nervous breakdown by having been
married twenty years ago. Joanna Southcote could not open her
box for the first time whenever she felt tired. Mr. Coulton
now says that the saint can only mean all the other sports:
but if he meant this strange distinction, why did he not say so?
Why in the world should he defend a dance which he wished to be
rare by an argument that would encourage it to be frequent?
So with his weird evolutions about the word "like." Whenever we say
"Dance at weddings and such like," there does remain the abstract
ambiguity "Like in what respect?" But the most natural sense
would seem to be "Like in being ordinary occasions for dancing."
Mr. Coulton passionately asserts that it must mean "At certain
long intervals of time." Why?
And now that his whole case hangs by this hair, when even to
preserve that, he has to admit an infinity of sports and games,
may I respectfully enquire what has become of the old big question
which was the only thing I ever discussed in my lecture?
G.K. CHESTERTON.